Which residents might benefit if property taxes are reduced or eliminated

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As numerous states in the United States consider eliminating property taxes, which residents would benefit? An argument about what could happen in Florida:

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If retirees on fixed incomes can’t afford their insurance payments and families can’t figure out how to cover their tax bill, maybe. Yet the number of Florida homes and buildings that are delinquent on their property taxes has fallen slightly since 2020. The number of foreclosures has increased a bit, but remains low. The state’s housing market is fraying and distressed sales are increasing, but that’s because of climate change and mortgage rates, not tax assessments. Floridians may not like paying a higher tax bill, and carrying costs might be spurring some of them to downsize. But in general, property taxes are levied on people who can afford them. The typical homeowner earns twice as much as the typical renter, and has 43 times the net worth.

Tenants are “the loser in all this,” Ken Johnson, a professor of finance at the University of Mississippi, told me. Many cities and counties offset lower taxes on owner-occupied properties with higher taxes on commercial residential properties. Landlords pass those costs on to their renters. The policy will also benefit longtime homeowners at the expense of prospective homebuyers. Low property taxes increase home prices, making it harder for people without a lot of money in the bank—such as new parents and just-married couples—to get approved for a mortgage. Then they remain tenants, subject to never-ending rent increases.

In addition to distorting the housing market, Amendment 3 will devastate public finances. Property taxes provide 43 percent of revenue to Florida’s municipal general funds, the bank accounts that cities and counties use to finance day-to-day services. Amendment 3 will cut collections by as much as 30 percent, and will hit hardest in areas with a lot of homes and not a lot of commerce. To cover the $12 billion budget hole, cities and towns will likely raise or impose sales taxes and sin taxes; increase fees at the DMV, permit offices, registrars, and courts; charge more for waste removal and water; and put additional taxes on tourists. The state will trade out a solidly progressive, uniformly applied tax for an obscure, regressive mishmash of charges.

But municipalities aren’t expected to make up all of the lost revenue. They’re expected to cut. Amendment 3 explicitly protects tax financing streams for schools, meaning that cities and counties are contemplating draconian budget reductions for public-safety offices, libraries, after-school programs, summer camp, day care, flood prevention, public transit, roads, parks, senior services, homeless shelters, legal-aid clinics, domestic-violence shelters, and many other things. Austerity will be regressive too, harming the poor more than the wealthy. Rich Floridians aren’t relying on the bus to get to work. They’re not picking up free meals, taking adult-literacy classes at the library, or seeing a dentist at a pop-up clinic in a middle-school gymnasium either.

These predictions suggest an immediate reduction or removal of property taxes could prove popular with homeowners but has longer-term consequences for those who are not homeowners and for communities at large who will have to adjust their tax base.

Is this then similar to the mortgage-interest deduction that tends to benefit people who are already financially okay? Is there a way to reduce property taxes for all residences?

Thinking more broadly, is there any way that Americans who live in or own different property types could work together to address their concerns about property taxes and local revenues? While homeowners might be fed up with rising property taxes, how does this intersect with concerns about tax breaks given to data centers or whatever is the latest development rage? Or the work of business owners to limit their local taxes when local schools and other amenities benefit from such monies? Or local government bodies raising rates in order to have the revenues they say they need to provide local services?

If the different actors are trying to find a good advantage for themselves, their actions could impact others. Perhaps it is time more communities have conversations about taxes and services. What are their priorities? What do they need? What issues do they each face? They might not agree and communities or states might take different approaches but they might find some common ground or new approaches.

400+ focus groups of voters shows human nature of voters?

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After conducting hundreds of focus groups with voters in the United States, one commentator describes the participants:

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Since that moment, I’ve conducted more than 400 focus groups with thousands of voters across the political spectrum. To my knowledge, this is the largest and most consistent qualitative study of voter sentiment during the Trump era. Here’s what I’ve learned: People are wild. They are full of contradictions. They lament our deep political divisions while raging about their political enemies. They believe in grace but cut their Trumpy brother out of their life forever. They’re married to an immigrant but voted for the guy who wants to deport millions of people who have the same immigration status as their wife. They hate the government and want to lower the national debt, but they also want the government to spend more to help them and their communities. They call themselves pro-life but believe in a woman’s right to choose. I could go on.

This suggests voters have multiple motivations and opinions. They are not necessarily consistent in their principles and actions. They react to both what is immediately around them and broader social forces and changes.

In other words, the voters are people. They are doing their best to make sense of the world around them. Translating those beliefs and responses into neatly packaged political party platforms or bundles of issues that candidates consistently talk about is not easy.

With all that said, listening to voters can be helpful:

Listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics—democracy, after all, is the collective will of the voters—yet few people in politics do it. If you’re running a campaign, you might do a series of focus groups with voters in your district or state. If you’re a politician, you might go on “listening tours,” chat with people at the state fair, or host campaign events. But rarely do politicians and campaigns take the time to talk in-depth about why people feel the way they do.

The reality is, the closer you get to institutional politics, the further you are from the people whom politics and government are supposed to serve. Washington is less a swamp than a bubble, inside of which the rest of America becomes an abstraction.

Where is there room to find common ground or interests? Are there ways to connect with what people are experiencing or care about beyond providing talking points and political tactics?

This could also be linked to the reasons Americans often like local politics and government: these are potential neighbors who have more of a stake and interest in day-to-day community life. Go up to the regional or state or national level and it can be hard to connect to all the experiences and concerns voters have.

Industry and urban life lead to the disappearance of a flower in Chicago

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The case of thismia americana illustrates how human development can affect plants:

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In 1912, then a botany student at the University of Chicago, she was collecting moss in a swampy prairie at what is now 119th Street and Torrence Avenue when she happened upon this small, strange plant.

At the time of Pfeiffer’s discovery, there were only 18 known species in the Thismia genus, the most similar being Thismia rodwayi, a plant native to Australia and New Zealand. Thismia americana was the first of its genus found in the Northern Hemisphere…

However, in 1914, Pfeiffer reported a barn was built atop the site where Thismia americana was found. According to a journal entry, Pfeiffer last saw the plant in 1916…

“We’re very unlikely to ever find Thismia [americana] there again, because the history of that site is that it was a wetland complex, and then humans filled it in with a bunch of construction debris, soil, concrete, slag from the steel industry,” says Harry Kuttner, Calumet program manager at the Wetlands Initiative.

Nevertheless, scientists hope that Thismia americana could be found again. Over the past decades, organizations around Chicago have taken steps to restore the city’s green spaces, including Indian Ridge Marsh Park, where Thismia americana was discovered.

The story of this flower is one reminder of what was once there. So is the flooding that can arise after major rains.

The Chicago area has been under construction for two plus centuries now as European and American visitors came to the region and sought to build permanent settlements. This work can involve altering the landscape for human activities. Wetlands across the region were filled in and smoothed over for farming, residences, and industry. There are some wetlands still remaining and often local residents who advocate for keeping them.

As some species disappear, others might do well in sprawl. What plants replaced thismia americana in the ecosystem? How did wetlands adapt? Even as forest preserves as other spaces try to preserve natural areas within the region, the wetlands are not what they once were as human activity has affected the landscape.

When affordable housing is not affordable to those with few resources

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Who can access affordable housing in American communities?

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The poorest people in the U.S. face the most acute shortages of affordable homes. But the majority of low-income housing financed in recent years is for those earning 50% of an area’s median income or above, according to a survey of state housing agencies.

Some cities are now seeing an uptick in vacancies as rents for these units approach market rates. The result: Apartments designated as affordable sit empty because the poorest of the poor cannot afford them…

There are only about 4 million affordable rental units available for the country’s 11 million extremely low-income renter households, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s most recent annual report…

Yet homes set aside for these renters were only about 12% of the affordable housing units financed in 2024 by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit — a federal program providing tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low for at least 30 years, according to figures from the National Council of State Housing Agencies.

This fits with what I have seen with affordable housing in suburbs. When communities are willing to approve and go ahead with affordable housing, they limit the number of units available and the units are priced closer to the market rates than nothing.

So (1) where would such housing be located and (2) who would build it? Communities would need to approve housing for the poorest people living in the US. Few might be willing to do this. And even with incentives (such as the LIHTC noted above), what builders or developers would be interested in constructing these units?

The American public may have soured on public housing but it did provide a housing option for those who needed it. If there are not enough units available in the private market, where are they supposed to come from? And there needs to be some public and political will to address this concern or housing will continue to be for thseo with more resources.

Themes across three books about suburbs I reviewed since February 2026

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I enjoy reading and I enjoy reading good work by scholars in areas I am interested in. This reading recently included three books about different aspects of the suburbs and metropolitan regions for which I wrote book reviews in recent months. Here are the three books:

The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge by Willow S. Lung-Amam (my review here)

Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America by Stephen M. Koeth (my review here)

Zoning Faith: How City Politics Shape Muslim Communities in Chicago by Sultan Tepe (my review here)

Even as each book addressed particular topics and settings (the first about gentrification and responses to it in three Washington, D.C. suburbs, the second about Long Island Catholic parishes in the immediate postwar suburban boom, and the third about three Muslim congregations approaching zoning and theology in the Chicago region), several themes stand out across the books:

  1. Suburban communities are diverse and dynamic. Each author describes significant changes that impact and are shaped by residents, businesses, local leaders, and religious groups. These communities, organizations, and residents are not the same as they were in the past. Suburbs are changing places.
  2. The topics each author discusses are both broader across places and highly local. Take Lung-Amam’s cases of suburban gentrification outside Washington, D.C. Gentrification and redevelopment takes place across a number of American communities. How exactly it plays out with local coalitions for and against the gentrification differs. Comparing the experiences of three suburbs can help us think broadly of what has or could happen in other suburban settings.
  3. The collective life of suburban communities and religious congregations is worth studying. There are thousands of such groups across the United States. They each impact more people on a regular basis. A majority of Americans live in suburbs. Many Americans are connected to religious congregations. To live in a particular suburb shapes all sorts of daily experiences and outcomes as does participation in a religious congregation.
  4. There are multiple methods that can help us understand these communities and changes. The ones utilized across these books include working with historical documents and archives, ethnography and observations, interviews, and surveys. To work to explain changes can lead to creativity in collecting and analyzing data on what has happened and how people understand it.

A majority of Americans say working class describes them

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Pew Research recently asked Americans whether they would identify with being working class:

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Most Americans think of themselves as “working class” today: Overall, 60% of U.S. adults say the term describes them well. And the identity is widely adopted by people across all income and educational groups – including half of both Americans who have a bachelor’s degree and those who are upper income.

Working-class identification does vary by education and income: It is highest among Americans without a four-year degree and those who are middle income. But an analysis of data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year finds that seeing oneself as working class also has a heavy political tinge and differs by race and ethnicity.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to identify as working class – even after taking economics, occupation, education and other factors into account. Overall, 67% of Republicans and Republican leaners say “working class” describes them well, as do 55% of Democrats. And wide partisan gaps are evident across many demographic and economic groups.

Working-class identification differs by race and ethnicity. In particular, White adults are more likely than Black adults to identify as working class. About six-in-ten White (62%) and Hispanic adults (59%) overall view themselves as working class, as do roughly half of Black (54%) and Asian adults (52%).

Class boundaries are fluid and depend, in part, on perceptions people have of the categories. When Americans hear “working class,” they might think of particular occupations or particular lifestyles or certain income levels. What is working class as a concept? But because there is no “official” definition – social scientists can vary in how they define and measure social classes in the United States even as they generally agree there are some different groups – people can report their own interpretations.

Because of this fluidity, I wonder if there is data that shows how many of those who said working class describes them well would also say that “middle class” also describes them well. The middle class has been a category to which many Americans have aspired, to have a successful American life where one is not lower class or upper class. In previous surveys, many Americans with varied traits have identified as middle class.

And it would be interesting to compare these findings to those of previous eras (with or without survey data). Are there periods in American history where American adults are more or less likely to identify as certain social classes and what influences these shifts? If there are times when majorities of Americans would identify as middle class, is this a shift and what caused it?

As Americans lack third places, why not just call a business “Your 3rd Spot”?

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The business Your 3rd Spot has one location in Atlanta and will open in 2028 in suburban Schaumburg, Illinois. Their website first features videos and pictures of a vibrant social scene with food, activity, and conversation, and then they describe what they are about:

This directly references the idea of “third places,” a concept popularized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Oldenburg suggests Americans lost the places between home and work where they could meet and talk to other residents. Coffee shops (Starbucks tried to see itself as part of this), bars, settings that did not require the kind of activity or conversation that occurs at home and work. They could talk about community and life.

This is not necessarily a new business model. There are a number of local and national businesses that offer food and entertainment. Rather than having just a restaurant or just activities, such places provide a range of options for customers.

What does it cost to participate in this 3rd Spot?

This is not necessarily a new business model. There are a number of local and national businesses that offer food and entertainment. Rather than having just a restaurant or just activities, such places provide a range of options for customers.

It will be interesting to see if the clear pitch to be a “third place” works. Will true community develop or is this another option for consumers to consider as they seek out social activity along the car-dominated streets of the sprawling United States?

Comparing a European football club to a McMansion

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Celtic FC in the Scottish Premiership might be compared to a McMansion:

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At the heart of it is a question; is Celtic nothing more than a McMansion?

A McMansion is basically a house built to look far more impressive than it really is. They became hugely popular in America from the 1980s through the early 2000s, when developers realised there was a market for enormous suburban homes with grand entrances, fake columns, huge windows, elaborate rooflines and all the visual trappings of wealth, even if the actual design was incoherent and the materials underneath were cheap…

Because Celtic’s front elevation looks magnificent. We have that cracking facade; The Celtic Way leads up to the stadium with that impressive front door. The specs read great. Sixty thousand seats, a global support, European Cup history, championship banners, huge revenues, commercial partnerships, corporate hospitality, cash reserves and a stadium recognised around the world. On paper, and from the outside, this is one of the great football institutions. The photographs look fantastic, the brochures look fantastic and the accounts look fantastic. But walk round the back…

That is Celtic’s problem. With us, it’s not as straightforward as saying that it’s all an illusion, because the façade is not fake. The wealth is real, the scale is real, the support is real and the history is real. What is false is the assumption that all of that automatically means the institution underneath has been built to the same standard.

This comparison gets at the third dimension of McMansions: their architecture and design. The stereotype is that such large homes spend a lot of effort on the front. When people drive by or come to visit, they see a lot on the front of the house. Perhaps many windows, lots of gables, a two story foyer, pillars, and a mishmash of architectural styles. But walk around the sides and back and you might just see siding. Or go inside and the quality of the finishings is average.

I find the final paragraph cited above most interesting: the author does not say that the wealth or status is not real just because it is primary displayed in the facade. Rather, the appearances of the football club do not match the processes and outcomes. There is a lot of flash and little long-term success. Critics argue McMansions are fake and are going to fall down but they were (are, still, to some degree) popular and signify something. Many do not seem as bothered by the facade. Aren’t first impressions important? Wouldn’t you want to put your best face forward to the world?

The alternative analysis would be to suggest that a football club is a more humble home style but with quality construction and better long-term outcomes. It would be a home “with good bones” that could withstand challenges and changes in tastes. It would be steady. I do not know what style might match this in Scotland but perhaps in the United States it might be a traditional farmhouse or Victorian or bungalow (and not the newer imitations of these styles).

Describing in 1857 a small Chicago area community that would later become a larger suburb

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In 1857, C. W. Richmond and H. F. Vallette described the small Illinois community of Cottage Hill:

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The village of Cottage Hill is pleasantly situated on the line of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, sixteen miles west from Chicago. The first settler here was J. L. Hovey, who came from Painesville, Ohio. He built a small house in 1843, which he kept as a hotel, it being favorably known by the farmers of the Fox and Rock river counties, who then teamed their own produce to Chicago, as the ‘Hill Cottage.’ The ‘Hill’ proper lies half a mile from the railroad, and commands as fine a prospect of prairie, cultivated farms, groves, cottages, and railroad trains, as one could desire to behold. This place being but 15 1-2 miles from the centre of business in Chicago; having good water, pure air, and railroad trains hourly passing – all of which stop here – must soon become known to those who would find for themselves and families, at a convenient distance from the city, a retreat from the noise and dust of its hot and crowded streets. (194)

This sounds like a suburb. A beautiful natural setting. Railroad access to Chicago. A small community. Away from the hustle and bustle of the big city.

However, at the time of the description, Cottage Hill (later Elmhurst) had very few people. The 1870 Census counted 329 residents. The train line offers access to Chicago but it is less than a decade old at this point. Commuting to Chicago is limited.

Elmhurst today is quite different. It has over 46,000 residents and the median household income is over $149,000. There is little open land on which to build. There is still greenery – laws, trees, parks – and road and train access to Chicago.

What this suggests to me is that long before the mass suburbanization of the twentieth century (Elmhurst had the highest percentage population increase in the 1920s), Americans had a suburban ideal. Even in the 1850s these two writers had a sense of the contrast between Cottage Hill and Chicago. They may not have envisioned the suburbs looking like they do today but some of the key elements are there long before suburban populations swelled.

From homes help Americans build wealth to home values as the key to the whole economy

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Some time ago, Americans shifted toward seeing homeownership as a means to having and building wealth. The next step might be to suggest that this wealth based in homes is holding up the economy:

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Those high prices are real, but are also a bit of an illusion, investor Bob Elliott argues in a post this week…

That perception is making a lot of homeowners feel relatively well-off — and helping drive consumer spending, which powers the economy.

“Without the perception of high prices there is a significant threat that the key linchpin of the whole economy might start to unravel,” Elliott wrote…

For now, the housing market recession isn’t really dragging down the overall economy. If anything, people are still spending money because their homes make them feel rich. It’s just sort of a weird situation.

This is the argument: American homeowners have a lot of wealth in their homes so they spend more on other things because they feel like they can rely on that wealth to back their purchases or debt.

This sounds different than what we saw in the late 2000s. When home values plummeted then, it triggered larger numbers of missed mortgage payments and foreclosures. This led to problems for banks and financial institutions. A bailout ensued.

The piece above suggests that if home values stagnate or fall, this would affect consumer spending, which then affects the whole economy. Either way the whole economy was affected; all the financial losses in the 2000s affected all sorts of areas even if the biggest hit was to banks and financial firms. Here, lower home values would change what people might spend on new smartphones or on food or on entertainment or clothes. A downturn in spending in an economy that relies on consumer spending would be bad news.

Put it another way: what would Americans not buy or spend on if home values had not risen as much as they have in the last decade or so?